ZFP-X: Efficient Embedded Coding for Accelerating Lossy Floating Point Compression

Today’s scientific simulations are confronting seriously limited I/O bandwidth, network bandwidth, and storage capacity because of immense volumes of data generated in high-performance computing systems. Data compression has emerged as one of the most effective approaches to resolve the issue of the exponential increase of scientific data. However, existing state-of-the-art compressors also are confronting the issue of low throughput, especially under the trend of growing disparities between the compute and I/O rates. Among them, embedded coding is widely applied, which contributes to the dominant running time for the corresponding compressors. In this work, we propose a new kind of embedded coding algorithm, and apply it as the backend embedded coding of ZFP, one of the most successful lossy compressors. Our embedded coding algorithm uses bit groups instead of bit planes to store the compressed data, avoiding the time overhead of generating bit planes and group tests of bit planes, which significantly reduces the running time of ZFP. Our embedded coding algorithm can also accelerate the decompression of ZFP, because the costly procedures of the reverse of group tests and reconstructing bit planes are also avoided. Moreover, we provide theoretical proof that the proposed coding algorithm has the same compression ratio as the baseline ZFP. Experiments with four representative real-world scientific simulation datasets show that the compression and decompression throughput of our solution is up to 2.5× (2.1× on average), and up to 2.1× (1.5× on average) as those of ZFP, respectively.